OTTAWA — Martin St. Louis furrowed his brow and listened intently as the inevitable question came, the one that links pressure and production, the one that references the lengths to which the Rangers went to obtain his services and goes on to mention his zero goals in the seven games he has been a Blueshirt, carrying with it a record of 3-3-1.

“Yeah, of course there’s pressure,” St. Louis said after Monday’s practice in Westchester before his new team jumped on a plane and headed off to Canada to take on the Senators Tuesday night. “To me, there’s no bigger pressure than the pressure I put on myself. I knew it was going to be hard. There’s no time to feel sorry. You just have to man up and be a big boy about it and go to work every day. And that’s what I’m trying to do.”

St. Louis was obtained from the Lightning on March 5 in a trade that sent former captain Ryan Callahan, a first-round pick and a conditional second-rounder south to Tampa Bay. The idea was not only to jettison Callahan — with whom the Rangers front office could not come to an amiable contract extension — but to bring an elite scorer into New York, something that was desperately needed if the Rangers want to contend in the Eastern Conference.

Yet with the just two assists to his name, St. Louis has not been a difference-maker thus far, and the Rangers are tenuously sitting in the final wild-card playoff position with just 13 games to go.

“You got to stay positive,” the 38-year-old St. Louis said. “If I didn’t feel good out there, I’d be disappointed. But I feel great out there. Obviously I’d love to have more production to speak about, but there [are] a lot of games in the past where I played way worse and somehow I found some production.

“You have to be honest in assessing your game. Am I playing great? No. But I’ve played way worse than this.”

The initial experiment of coach Alain Vigneault was to put St. Louis on a line with his former center, Brad Richards, reuniting the pair that ran all the way to lifting the Stanley Cup for the Lightning in 2004. Yet that experiment ended two games ago, as the line might have shown glimpses of promise, but little on the score sheet.

“We don’t play the same way they do,” Richards said about the Lightning, with whom St. Louis spent the past 14 seasons. “He’s adjusting to that. It’s a little more by committee here, a little more balanced.

“He wants to buy in, he’s trying his best and sometimes when you do that, it mounts little bit that way. Just for him, if we get some wins, if we get two or three wins in a row, it’s going to be a little bit different feeling for him. He’ll relax. He’s a competitive guy, and doesn’t want to wait. He wants to make a difference right now.”

For the past two games, St. Louis has been on a line centered by Derick Brassard with Mats Zuccarello on the left. Although they had some good chances, St. Louis inexplicably ended Sunday’s 1-0 loss to the Sharks without a single shot attempted.

“That line had three grade-A chances in the first period,” Vigneault said. “If one of them goes in, it’s a totally different dynamic about how that line plays the rest of the night and how our team plays.”

The first one might lead to more, of course. But that first one is turning out to be a lot harder for St. Louis to find that might have been imagined.

“I want to do it as bad as anybody else,” he said, “so I’m going to keep plugging.”